My three favorite bookstores

Peter is inching oh-so-close to learning to read, which I figure is pretty good for 3 1/2. He knows all his letters by heart and is constantly asking us to "read that story" and "tell me what that says," and the other day he sure seemed to be able to read some of his books (but he's got a very strong memory so not sure if he was just reeling it off by recall).

Proud papa is pretty darned happy because next to P and the wife, books have always been just about the most important thing in the world to me. Books are my crack, basically, and there's nothing quite like the smell of an old bookstore filled to the gills with mysterious old tomes. Given an afternoon to myself, there's nothing I like so much as browsing in bookstores, wild man that I have become.

I've been in bookstores from Australia to Alaska, from Montana to Mississippi, and here are three of my favorite bookstores. Just missing the list were stores like my "hometown shop" of Ames Bookstore, Grass Valley, Calif.,; Hard to Find Books right here in Auckland; City Lights Books in San Francisco; Burke's Books in Memphis, and probably a dozen more I'm forgetting.

The Strand, New York City
When I lived in Noo Yawk for three months in the summer of '94, I had little or no income, but that didn't stop me spending it on used books. The Strand boasts of itself as "18 miles of books," and it's a sprawling labryinth right outside the Village, the kind of store that wanders in and out of itself and you might find yourself in a strange alcove that hasn't been seen by other people in 10 years. Cluttered and dusty and cobwebby but full of glamourous Manhattanites, it's an ideal New York City bookstore. My poverty didn't stop me spending many a lazy Sunday there in my summer in New York. And get this – they rent books by the foot: "Interior decorators, film/television set decorators and homeowners, give us your specifications and we'll select just the right books to fit your shelf, all priced by linear foot." That's extremely New York, ain't it?

Powell's Bookstore, Portland, Oregon
If this list were numerical, Powell's would be crouched at the top, the mastodon of bookstores. It's the largest independent book store in the world – an entire Portland city block, or about seven or eight regular bookstores put together, not counting several annex stores around town. And it's justly world-famous. I remember my Dad went there in the 1980s and came back with fantastic tales of this unimaginably huge bookstore he'd been to; it took me more than a decade to make it up to Portland myself, and I was not let down. While it's not the cheapest bookstore in the world the selection is unfathomably huge (entire sections devoted to arcana like Arctic history, giant microbes, rock history or Lewis and Clark) and you can easily spend entire days browsing there until you get that glazed, what-was-I-looking-for-anyways expression on your face and have to stop for some coffee. A sure sign of its status is that this book store is one of Portland's biggest tourist attractions. Bring your wallet.

Square Books, Oxford, Mississippi
Not just a literary icon, but an honest-to-gosh center of the community, Oxford's Square Books is easily the best bookstore in the state, cozy and amiable, not gigantic, but perched right in the old-fashioned town square and with an amazing selection of Southern literature (and a used books annex right down the road when I lived there). Such a good bookstore that the owner recently became mayor of Oxford, which had to be connected; the kind of place you can recline on the balcony overlooking the town square with a cup of coffee and while the day away discussing Bukowski while you feed a secret crush on the comely girl behind the counter. Until she files a restraining order, anyway.

LIFE: Yurt yurt yurt

LIFE: Yurt yurt yurt

...So we zipped away to the Oregon Coast for a little camping getaway to decompress from all the pre-moving stress, and finally fulfilled my lifelong dream of staying in a yurt. What is a yurt, you ask? Basically a round cross between a tent and a cabin, based on the Mongolian nomad dwelling. Several of the coastal campgrounds in Oregon have yurts and I've been vaguely curious about staying in one for years now. They're very popular though, and hard to get a reservation for, but I finally scored one. It was a pleasant change from our usual tent camping to be "yurted." It's not very hardcore camping - they even have electricity! - but there's something fun about staying in a little round fairy-tale house. Unfortunately there were no corners to tell Peter to stand in when he was bad. (Have we mentioned how fun 2 1/2-year-olds are?) But now I can say I have slept in a yurt.

It was a fine getaway as always - we went to our favorite coastal town of Bandon, which is nicely picturesque and touristy without being overwhelmingly so, and far less crowded than some of the more popular Oregon Coast haunts get. Now that we're just about a month away from leaving Oregon, we realized this might just be our last trip out there. There'll be beaches in New Zealand a-plenty of course, but the Oregon coast is something unique and special. I'll miss the views.

And Peter will miss the driftwood!

LIFE: A berry good time was had by all

LIFE: A berry good time was had by all

...Good lord, I feel like I ate my way through Independence Day. My folks came up for a visit for a few days and to visit their #1 grandson, and there was much eating of food, hiking, playing and so forth. One of our favorite things to do a couple times each summer around here is berry picking – we're in a big agricultural area and there's tons of strawberry, marionberry and blackberry farms, not to mention our absolute tops, blueberry picking. Took Peter out with my folks Monday for some berry pickin' adventures. This year's crop was the best we've seen in the 4 1/2 years we've lived here – huge, bright berries, falling right off the bushes. Then we stopped and bought pies at a local fruit stand. Hoo-ha!

So of course I made blueberry pancakes for our July 4 breakfast. And between my folks and I we've got about 10 pounds of berries to use in coming months. Berry-licious! The diet starts again next week.

LIFE: Hot hot hot

LIFE: Hot hot hot

Whoo-ee, it's been hot 'round these parts. Temperatures right up around 100 last few days, which is on the "oh my god" side for our corner of Oregon. Fortunately we beat the heat by heading to a local riverside haunt Sunday afternoon (where you can examine the colorful local folk and count their horrible apparently self-applied tattoos). Then Monday, which I had as my day off, we fled to the oh-so-fine Oregon Coast, specifically the Coos Bay area. Amazing how a mere 70-80 miles west, the temperature can be a good 25 to 30 degrees cooler. We hung around the very scenic Cape Arago area west of Coos Bay, one of our favorite spots, which has some fine beaches surrounded by rugged rock formations. Here I help Peter develop that incredibly important manly skill of building, and then smashing, sand castles:

It was strange to realize that just might be our last trip to that particular part of the Coast. At just a hair over two months until we leave Oregon for New Zealand, I'm starting to realize we might just be doing some things "for the last time." I'm really glad we got in our fine John Day camping trip a couple weeks ago because that was on my list of things to see before leaving Oregon. But Oregon is an extremely cool place with so many sides, and there's still so much I want to try and do again and only a limited number of free weekends remaining -- we have to visit our favorite coastal haunt of Bandon again, of course, and do the Eugene Saturday Market another time or two; by gum we simply must go to the big city of Portland one more time and visit Powell's and all that jazz...

And then there's all the things we've NEVER done in Oregon in our 4+ years here and it's starting to look like we won't get a chance. Never really spent much time in Salem, Oregon's capital, or visited the Oregon Caves National Monument deep deep in the country past Grants Pass (which doesn't allow kids under 4 in most of the caves). Never made it to the far, far reaches of Oregon like Baker City, Ontario or Hell's Canyon. We've done about 75% of the coast but I always wanted to go to Tillamook and visit the cheese factory there. Only been to Corvallis, home of Oregon State University, once, and that was just driving through. Ah well... it's 96,000 square miles of space to see, after all. And who knows, we might well be back someday...

LIFE: 'The more thou dammest it up, the more it burns...'

LIFE: 'The more thou dammest it up,
the more it burns...'

...Egad, two days of not going to bed until after 1 a.m. aren't as easy as they used to be. Thank God I'm off work today. Had to work the Saturday night shift, then last night, made the trek down to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and their opening weekend media nights. (One of the few perks of the job, free tickets and I get to pretend I'm a bona-fide theater critic.)

They always invite folks from my paper (and, um, slightly bigger ones like the SF Chronicle, Seattle Times and New York Times) down for several nights of performances to review. So last night my buddy Patrick, his partner Karen and I saw "The Two Gentlemen Of Verona," which I'd never seen performed before. Always a blast visiting Ashland, browsing bookstores and eating at good restaurants, not to mention the festival... It was a bummer to realize it's probably the last time I'll be at the festival. (And next summer they're doing "The Tempest," dammit.) Bought myself a souvenir T-shirt as solace.

"Verona" was good fun -- it's one of Shakespeare's earliest plays so it lacks a little polish, but you can see him trying out a lot of his comedic themes (cross-dressing, people falling in love at the drop of a hat, etc). Best of all, it's got a dog in it, and the trained pooch they had onstage Sunday was amazing. It was a lively production that had lots of flash that helped skim over some of the play's inherent faults.

Yesterday was Father's Day too, my third one since I became a dad. After working the night before and going to Ashland in the evening, didn't plan too much activity, although I did have an awful craving for IHOP so we went out to breakfast there and witnessed the menace Peter can create in a crowded restaurant (two words: thrown toys). Ah well. It was a nice day anyway as (cue sappy music) pretty much any day with P in it is. Being a dad is a lot of work, but it's a hell of a lot of fun too.

LIFE: Out into Eastern Oregon, part 2

LIFE: Out into Eastern Oregon, part 2

…Continuing our travelogue of last weekend's Eastern Oregon adventures at the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument. We left off Saturday, where we continued our trek east to the final section of the John Day Monument, Sheep Rock. They had an excellent visitors center there full of paleontological goodness. Couldn't linger too long with a fidgety toddler who wanted nothing more than to touch all the "dinosaurs," though.

Sheep Rock, right, is a really cool eroded mountain that looks nothing at all like a sheep.

You get some really beautiful close-up views of the rock formations out there. Each layer of rock had a completely different color. Mighty purty.

I particularly liked this overlook of much of the monument – the mesas in the background look like they were cleanly sliced off at the hands of some giant's axe, don't they?

We spent the night at a campground near John Day, which is a town of about 2,000 people that's the biggest town in a 100-mile radius or so I think. Very podunk but kinda quaint place, it's hard to imagine living so far from any major cities. It makes rural Roseburg feel like downtown Tokyo.

We drove on all the way down south from John Day to Burns, basically a town-slash-truck stop on Oregon's Highway ... It's a beautiful drive south, across high alpine plains that reminded me somewhat of Alaska. We saw a ton of wildlife in general on this trip – deer, elk, hawks, rabbits, snakes and coyote, plus about a zillion chipmunks. They swarm over the road like dust at some points; you can seem them scurrying out of the way as you hurtle down the empty highways (and it's almost impossible to avoid running over a few of the fuzzballs).

Once you're at Burns, you hit the highway west toward Bend. The scenery here is pretty much what I expected all of Eastern Oregon to look like – two-plus hours of this:


But we stopped in civilized Bend, ate takeout Indian food and basked at their lovely riverside park before taking the final lap homeward. If you look on a map of Oregon, we basically drove in a gigantic loop over the Cascades to the East and back. And how did Peter feel about his 937-mile trek of a weekend?

LIFE: Out into Eastern Oregon, part I

LIFE: Out into Eastern Oregon, part I

...Whew, 937 miles of round-trip driving later, I return! We ventured far into the dusty ragged outlands of Eastern Oregon over the weekend for a fine camping trip, and here's a few photos of our journey for you.

I've always wanted to go into Eastern Oregon, but the furthest I've ever been is Bend. The "east side" is the size of about 2/3 of the state, but the vast majority of the state's 4 million people live in a narrow strip of the western state along Interstate 5. The images you have of Oregon being wet, green and leafy don't apply to the east side. East Oregon is big, open and empty, but it's a pretty gorgeous place. I was expecting it to look kind of like most of Nevada does – big, empty hills – but instead it turned out quite different, alternating forests with high plains, massive monoliths and eerie rock formations.

We spent most of our weekend checking out the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument, which is 14,000 acres of raw, epic landscape spread out over three separate locations around the wee town of John Day, Oregon. It's land that looks like it was cracked open at the hand of giants, with amazing colors, rocks of every shape and size, and a sense it's all barely been disturbed in the last zillion years or so. And because it's so far from everywhere and still early June, it was nearly deserted out there this weekend.

Here's a few photos from some of our weekend trek:

We camped our first night a bit south of the flyspeck town of Fossil, Oregon, and Friday night we went out to check out the most remote part of the John Day monument, the Clarno section. It's a huge rocky section of eroded palisades cliffs, erupting out of the sagebrush. You can hike right up to the base of them (not the easiest activity carrying a 2 1/2-year-old) and they're as impressive as they look.


Then on Saturday morning bright and early, we headed out to the Painted Hills, about 70 miles south of Fossil along Oregon Hwy. 26. These hills are impossible to capture on film – basically enormous mounds of clay and minerals that are filled with a dazzling array of colors, reds, golds, browns, etc. They range from mountain-size to ten feet tall.



Up close, you get an idea of the shifting colors, which change depending on the angle you look at and the time of day you seen them. Poor Peter really really really wanted to climb on them. Unfortnately this is forbidden, because these hills aren't as sturdy as they seem –

Extreme close-up view! If you look at them they're like crumbling clay, you can pick them apart with a finger. It's almost like they're held together by force of will.


And here's Peter, surrounded by the awesome glory of Eastern Oregon's bounty … and playing with dirt. The toddler mind, ladies and gentlemen.

I don't want to overwhelm with the photos of rocks and hills, so we'll continue our journey to the rest of the monument and through Eastern Oregon tomorrow!

LIFE: Rock the vote

LIFE: Rock the vote

So we're having a primary election in Oregon in a few weeks, and yesterday we got the League of Women Voters of Oregon voter's information guide. Sure, it’s got your big names, but the best part is the “fringe” candidates. The League allows the candidates to print statements verbatim, without editing or spellchecking, which results into rare insight into the heart and soul of candidates. And that’s why I’m asking you to consider Bob Leonard Forthan of Portland, little-known Republican candidate for Oregon governor, whose wisdom includes these statements…

Meet Bob:
Graduated from Jefferson high school nineteen seventy no prior experience in elected office, but I have ran some community involvement I have ran for Mayor of Portland three times and Governor twice.

On education:
My answer to group grades together for example kindergadin and first grader, second and third graders, ect, then using teachers knowledge letting the best students to help teach the less off students, I feel putting more money to improve Oregons educational system is a waste. NOTE; if elected Oregon schools will have no after schools activeties example no plays, sporting events, rose festivle events, due to envormental problems.

On health care:
Nothing in the near future to make health care in Oregon more accessible, but if exlected I would like to build housing on a grand scale, for example housing the size of the King Dome, and a population no less than two thousand and no more than five thousand, and if someone became sick the doctor goes to the patient, and every tenet in the king dome type living would have their own personal computer making their health care only fingers away.

He intrigued me with “kindergadin.” But he won me over with the plan to erect “King Domes” throughout Oregon to throw poor people in. Don't let the bad spelling stop you. Consider Bob.

LIFE: Peter is the Egg-man

LIFE: Peter is the Egg-man

...Happy Easter to all and all a good night. We missed Roseburg's big Easter Egg Hunt at the park yesterday (and it was raining anyway) so we did a mini hunt for Peter in the front yard this a.m. between showers, hiding plastic eggs with chocolate candy inside all over. He got quite into it, lots of "found that!" and "there egg!" Then he wanted to do it all over again once he found all the eggs. (Note our season-inappropriate recycling of his Halloween bucket as the Easter basket.)

We were on an impromptu trip up to Portland yesterday to get our city fix (and take Peter to the swell Sesame Street exhibit at the Portland Children's Museum). I did the visits to Music Millennium and Powell's and picked up plenty of books and CDs -- at MM, I scored "Talk Normal: A Laurie Anderson Anthology" which I've been meaning to get for years, a copy of "Pet Sounds" by The Beach Boys to replace one I lost years ago; "The Covers Record" by Cat Power, and Bloc Party's "Silent Alarm" CD, which is excellent, full of windmilling guitar riffs. Then at the finest bookstore in all the land, Powell's, I scored paperbacks of Haruki Murakami's "Underground" and "Sputnik Sweetheart" (I loves the Murakami); "Mystery Train" by Greil Marcus, a legendary music-criticism book I've been hunting for; "The Rough Guide To Elvis"; "Why Orwell Matters" by Christopher Hitchens which looks intriguing, and "Never Mind The Pollacks" by Neal Pollack because I find his satire amusing. That's the problem with living in a town with not much in the way of book or music shops – when I get to a town that has 'em, I blow a few paychecks. Ah well...

We also stopped in Woodburn for a big tulip festival. Despite the fact the fields were half-mud due to the constant rain lately, it was nifty and Peter got to pose fetchingly in the tulips. I'm sure the rain will stop eventually... July isn't that far off...

LIFE: Lost – Southern Oregon edition

LIFE: Lost – Southern Oregon edition

...So at the newspaper we've been busy covering this story in our back yard the past day or so, which is the top national news on CNN's Web page as I write this. Yep, Southwestern Oregon and our county are big enough that a family of 6 can get lost for two weeks and never be found.

It's hard to believe how remote some areas in our corner of Oregon can get. There are huge chunks of land in our county where you can feel like you're in the middle of Bolivia or something, not see anything but the occasional log truck for miles and miles. Beautiful, but a little scary.

We even drove some of the route this family took on their ill-intentioned drive to the coast last fall, and I can see how easy it is to get lost. It's a tiny winding route that zig-zags through steep mountain country, utterly gorgeous but impossibly isolated. When we drove it last fall, there were a couple points where I wondered if we'd end up lost for good ourselves. Consider then the wisdom of driving in a huge motorhome on these narrow roads in the middle of winter...

Fortunately, this family was all OK, and despite their poor choice of roads (a perfectly decent highway would've taken them from Ashland to the coast easily), they were well-prepared for their impromptu 2-week camping trip. It could've been a lot worse. And I imagine it's a trip they'll never forget.

LIFE: The news never stops

LIFE: The news never stops

AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND -- Well, we made it and are fighting off jet lag, Peter playing in the sunshine with all the great new cars and trucks his NZ grandparents gave him. And so I click on CNN's Web page this morning to see a headline reading, Teen wounded in Oregon school schooting. "Uh-oh," some tiny voice in my head says, and I click on it -- "Roseburg, Oregon" says the dateline.

Ah jeez. So one kid shot another 16-year-old at our local high school this morning, apparently. Fortunately it doesn't sound like anybody was killed, but man, as they say, "You never think it will happen here." The paper has been going in high-octane overdrive today I bet and it looks like they're doing a spectacular job getting what they can. Frightening stuff, though, not the kind of thing that should happen in a tiny town like Roseburg. I hope everyone's doing OK and the victim pulls through.

We already made the decision to move over here this fall, as I've been chronicling, for many reasons. There's stupid random violence everywhere, in every culture, but high school kids shooting each other over is a uniquely American phenomenon it seems like. I'll worry every day about my boy like all parents do, but over here I think I'll worry less he might end up someone's target.

Confused toddler crying, more New Zealand-centric posts later...

COMICS: Inside the 'Ultimate Avengers' DVD with writer Greg Johnson

COMICS: Inside the 'Ultimate Avengers' DVD
with writer Greg Johnson

I hooked up recently with Greg Johnson, the screenwriter of the new "Ultimate Avengers: The Movie" DVD that hits stores Tuesday.

Johnson happens to be from Roseburg, Oregon, where I hail from, and I thought it'd be fun to do a profile of this local-boy-turned-animation writer. Johnson, 45, has been writing stories for cartoons featuring characters from Spider-Man to the X-Men to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Johnson’s latest creation is a movie — the new “Ultimate Avengers” DVD from Marvel Comics, which comes to stores Tuesday. The straight-to-DVD release, rated PG-13, is first of a series of eight original “animated Marvel features” planned for release in coming months. Based on “The Ultimates” comic book series from Marvel Comics, it’s the story of a team of government-sponsored superheroes including Iron Man, Thor and The Hulk, who awaken the legendary World War II hero Captain America from suspended animation.

Johnson has already been tapped to write future installments in the animated films, including “Ultimate Avengers II” for release later this year, and “Iron Man” and “Dr. Strange” features. He also is developing a new television series spinning off from the popular “X-Men” comics and movies, “Wolverine And The X-Men.”

Greg was great fun to interview, but in my fanboy eagerness (I'm a big admirer of "The Ultimates" comics), I sent him a veritable flood of questions, which he very kindly gave great answers to -- but far too much to all fit in the print article for my day job. So for Spatula Forum readers who might be interested in this "inside look" at the animation industry and a pretty-cool sounding new DVD, here I present a much longer "director's cut" Q&A with Greg (and if you care to compare with the more traditional print article, you can find it over here).

How did you end up being approached for the "Ultimates" job?

I’ve written for various Marvel shows since the mid-1990s, and my latest job prior to the “Ultimate Avengers” was as head writer on a series for KidsWB called “X-Men: Evolution,” which ran successfully for four seasons. So when these direct to video projects came up, they gave me a call. I was right in the middle of developing a series for Cartoon Network called “Ben 10” at the time, but I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity. So I jumped ship.

How did you end up in an animation career? You studied art at Southern Oregon University – how did that lead to ‘Toon Town’?

When my wife and I first moved from Oregon to California, all I had on my resume was some work I’d done directing a couple of educational films in college, and a stint as a production assistant on a low-budget movie that was shooting in Ashland, Oregon. Persistence was the only thing that got me hired on at a small film company called Apollo Pictures, where I read scripts and wrote evaluations for the executives. I worked my way up to director of development … My experience there taught me one thing – I didn’t like being on the executive side of the desk. I wanted to be writing. So I took advantage of some professional relationships I’d made and got my first job writing on an animated series called “Biker Mice From Mars.” I loved it. Coming out of the development-heavy feature world, it was so refreshing for me to be involved in a process where you write something and it immediately gets produced.

I’ve always loved cartoons. My tastes when I was younger went from Spider-Man to Scooby Doo to anything Disney. What’s odd is that most of my focus as a writer seems to be in the superhero realm, though I was not an avid comic book reader as a kid. I picked them up occasionally, but I certainly didn’t follow any of them. Actually, that has probably helped me in my career, because I’ve never been swayed by a purist’s point of view or the decades of baggage that accompany most of the Marvel heroes.

When you sat down to adapt "The Ultimates," how faithful did you want to be to the source material? You're pretty much adapting Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch’s first 12 issues or so in a 90-minute movie.

Adapting a comic story is really no different than adapting any other form of literature for the screen, in my opinion. The first thing you have to do is take it apart and determine what will translate and what won’t.

Using “The Ultimates” as source material served two purposes, though. One, it was an incredibly successful book in which Millar and Hitch re-envisioned how the Avengers assembled for the first time, and so capitalizing on its success made good business sense. And two, it was a very cinematic story, not afraid to reveal the flaws of America’s favorite superheroes. The books established a well-conceived and exciting origin for the Avengers, particularly how Captain America became involved with them.

However, “The Ultimates” is a very mature approach to this origin, and some elements in the book were just not appropriate for young children in my opinion. So some deviation from the books was necessary. If you were to explain the story of Volume 1 in a sentence, it would be: The Avengers are formed, they can’t get along, they drift apart, and they end up banding together to fight the Incredible Hulk. One of the benefits of telling this kind of story on the graphic page is that you have the liberty to explore a kind of “day in the life” of the characters without necessarily needing the urgency of a larger plot escalating in the background. What is a fun read on the page can sometimes feel aimless on the screen.

What's the appeal of the Ultimate Avengers to you as a writer?

I view the Avengers as “The Dirty Dozen,” one of my favorite movies. They’re a group of diverse personalities all thrown together because of their abilities, not because they like each other. Teams are only interesting if they let their differences get in the way. I mean, you give five people special powers, and each one will handle it in a different way. Some let it go to their heads, like Hank Pym, and some only want to be good soldiers, like Captain America. Overall, the Avengers in this film are a blend of both The Ultimates and the Classic characters – so that’s why we’ve called it “The Ultimate Avengers.”

Did you have any problems trying to deal with the baggage of years of continuity with these characters like Captain America and The Hulk, or just try to approach them as clean slates?

I tend to cut loose the baggage immediately. Try running a PowerPoint presentation on any one of these characters, and it would be a confusing mess. You’ll find yourself trying to unscramble lives that extend into alternative dimensions, space travel, time travel, and family trees so broad that it would choke a genealogist. That is a product of nearly half-century of comic book writers trying to do their jobs and tell new stories. So Marvel has done something with their Ultimate line of books to remedy this, like Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Spider-Man, etc. The universe has basically been rebooted so new readers can enjoy them from a fresh take on their origins.

Who's your favorite member of the Ultimate Avengers to write and why? Who was hardest?

I loved writing Steve Rogers (Captain America). He’s a man out of his own time, having been the only superhero of his day back in 1945. And now, pulled from the ice after 60 plus years, he not only has to adjust to unfamiliar surroundings, but must come to terms with a world where he’s not the only superhero, but one of many.

The toughest was Hank Pym. He has the potential to be such a dark and unpleasant character. After all, there are even issues of spousal abuse in the books. On the same token, there is time in the books to work on redeeming him during the length of the succeeding issues. But in this movie, where Hank’s storyline is one of many, there just isn’t the time to redeem him to any satisfying degree. … Finding the balance with him was a challenge, but ultimately as a result, he’s become one of our most interesting and complex characters. You’ll see a lot more of this explored in the sequel.

How does writing a script for animation differ from writing for live action?

Animation has a very unique pacing to it. The scenes are shorter and the dialogue must serve two agendas simultaneously – furthering the plot, and reinforcing the character arc. In live action you can put two people in a room, and let their performance sustain a ten minute scene that’s fun to watch. That’s real tough to do in animation, where emotions often times have to be supported with dialogue, because you just can’t count on the ‘acting’ of an animated face to carry it alone.

What's your favorite project you've worked on?

For television, I really enjoyed writing “Buzz Lightyear of Star Command” because it had a nice blend of comedy and action. I’ve always had a love for Disney, and this was as close as I’ve ever come to contributing to the House the Mouse built. The most fulfilling was probably “X-Men: Evolution,” because the network handed us such restrictions that it seemed the series would die an embarrassing death after the first season. But then the network loosened the reins a bit, and I was able to take the series from “X-Men Lite” to a series that strived to respect what the X-Men were all about. The most exciting project would be the third direct-to-video, which is “Iron Man.” I had the freedom to create a new story around the established origin, and I think it came out very well. For fans of Iron Man, this one is going to be a real treat.

You've already got a full slate for the future it sounds like with "Ultimates II," "Iron Man" and more. What's the next project coming?

I’ve already written the first four of a planned eight DTV movies for Marvel and Lions Gate. “Ultimate Avengers,” “Ultimate Avengers II,” “Iron Man” and “Dr. Strange.” Each one takes twelve to eighteen months to animate, and I can still remember working on the script for “Ultimate Avengers” two summers ago while visiting my folks in Roseburg. I sat out on their back patio, the beautiful and peaceful Umpqua River spread out before me, and wrote superheroes battling alien Nazis. It doesn’t get any better than that.

I’ve got my fingers crossed that “Ultimate Avengers” is a success, because that will be what decides if there will be a fifth movie or not.

Can you tell us anything about the "Wolverine and the X-Men" series you're developing?

All I can say about this new show is that it will be a blend of the 1990s “X-Men” series, “X-Men: Evolution,” and the “X-Men” movies. Other than that, stay tuned…

What do you think of the final product? How does it feel to see your words come to animated life?

When I write, I always visualize the scenes in live action. So there’s always a moment of adjustment when seeing them animated. The director and the board artists do veer from the script on occasion, and I’m thrilled when they improve it. But sometimes they try things that aren’t as strong, in my opinion. And occasionally the director will add dialogue during the recording sessions, and it’s a surprise to see it on the screen. That happened a few times in “Ultimate Avengers.” So any dialogue that falls flat in the movie, just assume it was the director. Just kidding...